prior probability

As you may already have heard by now, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former ad hoc attorney and personal confidante, to three years in “Club Fed.” Mr Cohen had previously pled guilty to four separate criminal charges:

1. Tax evasion during tax years 2012 to 2016;
2. Making false statements to a bank in 2015;
3. Making illegal campaign contributions in support of Mr Trump’s campaign for president in 2016; and
4. Making false statements to Congress in 2017.

Bonus Questions: (a) What about the way more serious lies John Clapper told to Congress and to the North American public on 12 March 2013? Why isn’t the former Director of the U.S. National Security Agency being charged with the same crime? More bonus questions below the fold: Continue reading →

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, was launched on 15 January 2001, and according to this history of Wikipedia (via, where else, Wikipedia, of course!), the English version of this wonderful website (en.wikipedia.org) now contains almost six million articles. (See table below.) If these six million articles were published in book form, they would comprise over 2,500 print volumes of the old-school Encyclopædia Britannica, an imaginary tome of Borgesian proportions! By comparison, the print edition of the actual Encyclopædia Britannica contains only 64,900 articles in 32 volumes, a mere drop in Wikipedia’s proverbial bucket. Also, notice how the number of Wikipedia articles has grown at a fairly constant rate since 2005. When will this growth rate slow down or level off? In the meantime, should we call this constant growth rate “Wales-Sanger Law” in honor of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the co-founders of Wikipedia?

Source: Wikipedia

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss! Decree 349, one of the first laws signed by Cuba’s new president dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel when he assumed power in April 2018, went into effect on 7 December 2018. (Here is the full text of the law, in Spanish.) Under this draconian decree, all artists are prohibited from operating in public or private without prior approval by the government. Individuals or firms that hire artists without prior authorization can be punished, and artists who work without prior approval can have their materials confiscated or be substantially fined. Below the fold is Amnesty International’s strongly-worded condemnation of this humiliating restriction of artistic freedom in Cuba: Continue reading →

Science fiction writer William Gibson is reported to have said, “The future is already here–it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Be that as it may, check out the short videos below the fold explaining two futuristic Google projects: a fleet of self-driving cars called Waymo and a self-learning artificial intelligence program called AlphaZero: Continue reading →

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has just published a beautiful short essay in the journal Science in which he reviews a new game-playing algorithm called AlphaZero, a chess program that programs itself! Below the fold is an extended excerpt from his excellent essay: Continue reading →

That beautiful quote is from “King of the Night” (see video below), a short but poignant documentary about Imad Khachan, the owner of Chess Forum, the last remaining chess shop in New York City. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

Sorry to rain on everyone’s H.W. parade, but here is my three-part eulogy for one of the most morally despicable presidents of all time:

1. Sara Boboltz, via Huff Post: George H.W. Bush White House Once Ordered Drug Buy from Teen for Presidential TV Stunt.
2. Peter Eisner, via Newsweek: Manuel Noriega, the Invasion of Panama, and How George H.W. Bush Misled America.
3. Wikipedia: The 1991 Uprisings in Iraq.

H.W. also bequeathed to us the American with Disabilities Act, a law that has generated (and continues to generate) enormous and unnecessary amounts of federal litigation. So, excuse me for asking, but why are we celebrating this disgraced politician, who made so many callous and costly decisions?